In honor of Finishing The Crappy Stupid Proposal (after waking up at the crack of ASS today to do so), I will now talk about menstruation some more.

First, I must say, it is apparently That Time for quite a few of us around here. And it would seem that Weetabix's uterus and mine were separated at birth. Hers sounds *exactly* like mine. Except I don't go for sugar anymore for some reason, just salt. And mine also cries a lot more.

Oh, let me SAY. See, I live in NYC, remember? And nearly every day there's a big sob story with lots of pictures and stuff in the Daily News, my paper of choice. It gets me in the best of times. When I have PMS? It's horrible. You should see me, sitting there, bawling like a baby at the fucking Ann Landers column, let ALONE all the dead firemen's kids (the 300 or so firemen apparently left about 643 children) who were all setting off balloons and talking about their parents and stuff yesterday...

Second. Fuck. What was the second thing? I seem to have forgotten. I was gonna talk about tampons I know but I've forgotten the other thing. Dammit, this is what I get for waking up way too goddamned early...

Well, anyway. Onto the tampon story.

Now, for all you men out there (all 2 of you), I am assuming you have never had cause to explore the instruction manual associated with a box of tampons. So I have actually gone and fetched said manual out of one of my boxes of tampons so to be certain I am able to relate this in all of its terrifying glory.

Also, please bear in mind that the first time most of us of the female persuasion see this thing is around age 12 or 13. Typically, we start out with pads. Oh, wait, did I say pads? I meant TANKS. Yes, the pads that our mothers so thoughtfully purchase for The Blessed Event are invariably the size of heavy artillery. Apparently, our mothers thought that our first periods would be not unlike a geyser, spurting a font of blood unto the sky. Gigantic pads. Like to the point where you study your backside in the mirror, totally unable to comprehend how it could be that the rail gun is not poking out through your pantaloons. Seriously. Those fuckers are huge. You could swaddle several entire infants with a single Generic Brand Super Massive Deluxe You Could Bleed For Thirteen Weeks Into This Thing And Not Leak Maxi (And We're Not Kidding About The Maxi) Pads.

So after walking bowleggedly around for 4 - 7 days out of every month, a pubescent female, hearing her so-much-more-sophisticated (and probably stacked) friends tell her over and over again about the Joys of Tampon Usage (you can Swim! Really!), she will always give it a shot. I am going to try to relate what is clearly a fairly universal moment.

Regardless of brand, the very first thing you see when you pull the instruction booklet out of the box is this, in GIANT red or bright pink or some similar color letters:

WARNING: IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT TOXIC SHOCK SYNDROME (TSS)!

First thought in 13-year-old's mind: WHAT? Holy fucking shit what the fuck?

(Yeah, I cursed a lot as a 13-year-old. Wait...I curse a lot now.)

In the first sentence about TSS, the word "death" is used. I shit you not. So you're like, "Huh? I've never ever heard of somebody dying from using a tampon. But maybe then they were just too embarrassed and zillions of people die from it but nobody will say anything. How can these things kill me? I don't want to die, please god, don't kill me with a tampon..." and so on.

So anyway you read on. Apparently this TSS thing has something to do with leaving the bugger in too long. Or not. It could also maybe just be some sort of bizarre reaction. Higher-absorbency tampons are riskier.

Can you imagine getting THAT news? "Our Dearly Departed had an unfortunate tampon incident and died..."

Have I gotten the fear factor point across yet? Okay, good.

Setting the scene. Also invariably, said 13-year-old girl is alone in her bathroom of choice, usually the one affording the most privacy. There is absolutely no way wild horses could drag a 13-year-old girl into attempting to do this in the company of, say, a mother, or similar guidance figure. Nothing. Not if her life depended on it.

Step 1 (sayeth the instruction booklet): Wash. (okay, first of all, HA! I mean really. We wash our hands *after*, thank you. But anyway, 13-year-old girl ain't risking nothing, so she does.) It turns out that we're going to be heading back towards Step 1 a LOT over the next couple of hours, so keep some hand lotion at the ready.

Step 2: Positioning. The instructional booklet helpfully suggests several various postures to adopt while performing this maneuver. All of them require total nudity from the waist down. Some examples: One foot on the toilet, other foot on the ground. Squatting (whee, THAT's a fun one). Lying on back with one leg in the air after running around three times in a counter-clockwise circle during the quarter-moon and sacrificing a chicken.

Which is fine because it turns out you're going to make at LEAST as much of a huge bloody mess as sacrificing a chicken would.

Step 2 also helpfully mentions that you have to insert the tampon into your vagina. Good thing it said that. I might have gone and confused my orifices.

Step 3: Insertion. Right. Yes, this would be the tricky part. This step mentions the fact that the string should be on the outside. Important.

More important would be to inform any young girls HOW THE MOTHERFUCK you're supposed to GET this goddamned thing inside of you a. in the positions suggested, and, b. without getting blood fucking EVERYWHERE, especially on you.

Slippery little fuckers, those tampons are.

I like step 5. Step 5 is not, in my book, a step. Step 5 is: "Any discomfort?" It goes on to say that I should not FEEL anything if the Tampon is inserted correctly. This, this my friends is bullSHIT. You have a thing the size of a finger up inside you and you're walking around and you're not supposed to FEEL it? They're smoking the crack.

There is also a diagram of a tampon. The parts are labelled "Rounded Tip", "Barrel", "Fingergrip", "Small Tube", and "Strings". Ohhhh, stop with the technical tampon-industry jargon, man! "Small Tube"?? The fuck?

Anyway, after about 2 hours not including cleanup, and a whole LOT of tampons, I gave up. I wore pads until I was like 17, at which point I got a girlfriend to stand outside the bathroom door and coach. Pathetic, eh? At least I eventually discovered that pads smaller than Yemen existed. Oh, and those Wings things? They come all disarranged in your underpants and stick to your pubic hair. That always stunk. Cause you're trying to walk around and everything except that every step you take your pubes are getting yanked. Ouch.

Still, at least I did better than my gym teacher who of course (why DO these two always go together?) taught the Girls end of the separated cartoon egg and sperm classes. She tried her first tampon because she had to be in a ballet recital. And she failed to get it out of the cardboard applicator (another tampon industry phrase, it's a fucking TUBE, to call it an "applicator" is really pushing it) and so it was all wedged in there INSIDE the cardboard tube which as you might imagine caused considerable discomfort especially while ballet dancing.

Anyway, there you have it. These days I'm much more laissez-faire about the whole menstruation thing. I'll use tampons if I'm on my second day, which is when I'm bleeding like a stuck pig. The rest of the time it's barely enough to warrant one of those sickly midget Light Days pads. Which is great. But don't get jealous, girls, my uterus MORE than makes up for it with my entire fucking WEEK (all 7 days) of horribly sore and tender bosoms, violent mood swings, binge eating, and sobbing all the time.

- onehanded